NASA is outsourcing laborious Martian cartography to Earth children with a website that entices users to make a game out of sorting through the space agency's hundreds of thousands images of the Red Planet.

Forgotten where you parked your car? Lost your hotel, tent or even family and friends? For the terminally disorientated, the Ecco Personal Pocket GPS Locator is designed to put you back on track. Indeed, this hi-tech key fob proves to be more than just the novelty item that it first appears.

Following our discussions earlier in the week on the pros and cons of packaged applications, the ‘build versus buy’ debate rolls on. Whether it’s ERP, CRM or other solutions for dealing with core business requirements, we’d be interested in gathering a bit more information on where you are today and how this is changing.

If 40 Gb/sec InfiniBand is not enough for you, then you'll be happy to hear that InfiniBand switch maker Mellanox Technologies is going to crank its switches past 11 to deliver 120 Gb/sec ports in its MTS and IS switch families.

Those of you who object to a) Microsoft, b) California and c) effusive Yanks gushing complete and utter cobblers are advised to look away now, because what follows is really going to put a downer on your day.

By Jove, I think we've finally got an explanation for the unremitting horrors of so much of modern life - the way in which anything touched by politics, bureaucracy or officialdom simply turns to shite.

You know what happens: everyone in marketing focuses on the processor speeds, the cache size, the go faster stripes and the other fancy new features of the server and its component parts. You also know that the real challenges of any system only start with the business case and getting it installed.

Fortinet has set a price of $12.50 a share for its initial public offering on Wednesday. If all goes to plan, the security appliance firm and its investors stand to rake in a more than $156m through the offer.

The argument over the use of artificial legs to gain better results in athletics has taken a new turn. Following lengthy legal debates, it had been accepted that prosthetic legs confer no substantial advantage, but now the very scientists who argued that case have changed their minds.

Reports that Nokia smartphones could one day all use the Linux-based Maemo OS instead of Symbian just won’t die - especially now that Maemo representatives have allegedly confirmed that N-series Nokias will soon lose Symbian.

New Zealand has been rated the world's least corrupt country for 2009, topping Transparency International's "Corruption Perceptions Index" (CPI) with a squeaky-clean 9.4 out of 10 in the league table of just how corrupt, or otherwise, nations are reckoned to be.

The Finepix F200EXR is the replacement for the Finepix F100fd, which we looked at last January. Although there are a number of similarities between the two cameras – they have the same sized image sensor, optical zoom and camera body – there are some differences too, not least the Finepix F200EXR’s new EXR image sensor.

A prototype electromagnetic mass-driver, intended to hurl jet aircraft into the sky from the decks of aircraft carriers, has gone into operation at a former airship base in New Jersey. The new kit could be even more important to the Royal Navy than it will be to the US fleet.

As all the world knows, the Large Hadron Collider - the mightiest particle-punisher in the world and possible portal to other dimensions - is shortly to fire up again, following last year's catastrophic liquid helium superfluid explosion.

Mozilla plans to debut a "lockdown" feature in Firefox 3.6 to force third party application developers to toe the line by preventing them from adding their own code into the browser's components directory.

The UK’s e-book lovers are panting with anticipation that Sony’s 3G-connected Reader Daily Edition will arrive here by Christmas, following the firm’s creation of a pre-order page for the gagdet in North America.

This will cheer up those backroom boys among you who've ever had a strong desire to let a server have it with an arsenal of weapons, but didn't have a Springfield Armory M14, Heckler & Koch MP5 or IMI Uzi to hand:

Piers Corbyn's renegade weather outfit has comprehensively trumped the taxpayer funded Met Office. Back in August, Corbyn's WeatherAction forecast storms for 17-19 November. Or more accurately, WA made this prediction, upgrading it to 85 per cent accuracy:

While chief technology officer Ray Ozzie was away in the clouds at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference, technical fellow Mark Russinovich got down and dirty with the true heart of Windows - the kernel.

Mad scientists at IBM say they've made "significant progress" towards creating a computer chip that can emulate the human brain's ability to sense, perceive, comprehend, and interact with the real world*.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if Google offers the world a web service, large numbers of people will convince themselves that it's superior to anything else they can get their hands on - and less likely to condemn them to some sort of Redmondian future in which a single corporation has them in a metaphorical vice grip.